Australian native Cave is well-known here in the States as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a gothic rock outfit that has been combining eclectic influences and genres to great effect for the better part of three decades.  In addition to his many musical ventures, Cave wrote the script for director John Hillcoat's 1988 feature debut Ghosts...of the Civil Dead.  Years later, he penned The Proposition, Hillcoat's internationally-acclaimed down under western starring Pearce.  Following that, he composed the score for The Road and once again works with Hillcoat on Lawless.

Of their longtime collaboration and friendship, Cave recalled, "It’s been going since he came out of art school at nineteen or twenty, and we’ve been friends in Melbourne since then. Been working together since then on rock videos and that sort of stuff and his films that he made before The Proposition where I was brought in to write the script. It came about from frustration that John was having trying to get an Australian western together and he kept getting these scripts written that were American westerns set in Australia. I kept saying, 'These are shit, man. These are not Australian westerns at all. They’re American westerns dumped in Australia.' He said, 'Well then, you write it.' So, I wrote that script."

Lawless is based on the historical novel The Wettest Country in the World, written by Matt Bondurant, a descendant of the movie's central siblings.  Prior to encountering this material, Cave had no prior experience working from a book.  "People saw The Proposition and liked what me and John did, and Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher had found this book and brought it to us on the strength of that," he said.  "I had no interest at the time of writing someone else’s work, but Matt Bondurant’s book was so stunning and had the elements that bound me and John together which was a kind of film lyricism that he had on top of brute violence that was very much in that book, so we did it. And now we’re fishing out there for new ideas."

His initial reluctance to bring Lawless to the screen gave way when he read The Wettest Country in the World.  Cave zeroed in on certain elements, as he said, "It was honestly not something that I wanted to do to begin with. I’d rather make up my own stories. The book was too delicious to turn down and John really wanted to do it. It really had the two elements that we liked. The dialogue was to die for. It looked like it was going to be pretty easy to do as well. As it turned out, it went on for a long time. The process is not that all dissimilar because in way with The Proposition and this other script I wrote for John called The Death of Bunny Munro, these were John Hillcoat coming to me and saying, 'I want to make an Australian western,' for example. He gives me the premise and I sit down and write the story. Once I have the story, I pretty much have it."

Thanks to the unsparing brutality of badland outlaws in The Proposition to the utter desolation of The Road's post-apocalyptic world, Hillcoat is associated with a distinct and blunt depiction of violence, which colored Dane DeHaan's impression of his director.  DeHaan explained, "It was amazing for how violent his movies are I think it’s really astounding what a gentle human being he is. That’s probably the first thing that made an impression on me. We had two weeks of prep with him where we sat down with him and Nick and the whole cast and just went through the script and it became such a collaborative process about taking the script and molding it to a way where everybody was happy and we really felt like all of the plot holes or everything that wasn’t working all of a sudden is working. After those two weeks everyone’s ready to do the movie and we were doing thirty set ups a day so we needed to be ready to do the movie."

DeHaan, who won many a fan this year as the lead in the found-footage superhero film Chronicle, invested no small amount of time to research, ensuring that the character of Cricket isn't a caricatured depiction of the rural South during the early 20th Century.  "The dialect it’s fairly regional, it just has to do with finding the people in that region, listening to them," he explained of finding the specific accent. "I’d write it down phonetically and then I’d learn all my accents with phonetics. I worked with a coach and I’ll just break down every single line not how it’s spelled, but how it sounds. And in that way I hope that it wasn’t just a generic Southern accent, but actually like a fairly accurate, regional, Virginia mountain dialect."

The precision that he applied to Cricket's dialogue also extended to the physical representation of the character, as DeHaan explained, "In terms of how he walks, he has Rickets, I mean that’s in the book, that’s in the script. The stereotypical idea of Rickets is that you’re bowlegged. I didn’t want to be that stereotype I wanted to be something a little more grounded and real so I started looking at pictures and I found this picture of a kid whose legs were like this. And so I worked with the costume people because every time I went like that my feet would go up on the side and I was like, well I can’t look like I’m walking on my side so my feet that’s not accurate. So I worked with the costume people to put a slant in my shoes so I could do that to my legs and still have my feet flat on the ground. And then just in terms of attitude and all that, that just comes from looking at the person and looking at what he does and having what he does inform who he is as a person."

Outside of Bondurant's text, Cave didn't have to do too much research on his subject matter.  Asked if he had been familiar with the American experiment in prohibition that led to an increase in bootlegging, the writer answered, "I knew about it. I’ve watched a million movies. Also know it’s a failed policy that still exists today with the so-called war on drugs. It was a disastrous policy then, and it’s a disastrous policy now. It doesn’t work. I grew up in Australia. All we’re fed… all we watch is American stuff. When I grew up, Australians weren’t making TV shows – we just watched American stuff. I was raised on American popular culture. I knew more about what happen to the Mormons and Brigham Young than I did about the aborigines in Australia."

Cave very much thinks of himself as a musician, with screenwriting a sort of ongoing side project.  His inclination towards music informs his writing, as he explained of the interlay between writing and composing, saying, "It was always that me and Warren Ellis were going to do the score. Me and John talked about the score as I was writing the script. We knew that we were going to have songs in it, within the actual writing, there’s a scene where something happens to Forrest in the film. We knew that we wanted it to be brutally violent on one side, but also have this haunting dreamlike quality as well. There was scene written that would accommodate a piece of haunting music, for example. I’ve done that with The Proposition. I had very naively put in the musical direction into the script. Which the actors thought was pretty funny."

The actors in this film include Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, and Noah Taylor.  Unlike many of members of the cast, DeHaan had the opportunity to play opposite nearly everyone. "I think one of the best parts of this experience for me was I got to act with some of my heroes," he said.  "I got to act with Guy Pearce, I got to act with Gary Oldman, that was amazing. And Guy, you know, he's a collaborative person. He will do the take and then, like I said, it'll become a conversation. 'How was that for you, what can I do to make it better for you or what can you do to make it better for me or what can we both do to make the scene the best it can be?' So to just be kind of like thrown in the ring with who I consider to be a master, like a total cameleon, I was in awe, but I also wanted to work with him. I didn't just want to stay in back and watch him."

Though he receives prominent billing, Gary Oldman's role as crime boss Floyd Banner is fairly limited. "It was always a small role. It was always like a cameo. He told us on set that he looked at is as kind of a to pay respect to old movies. To him it was like a throwback, it was a chance for him to do something different and he had liked the people involved. He had worked with Hardy a bunch [on The Dark Knight Rises and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy] so I think he was just okay. He was only on set for three days. And those three days were amazing. [Shia] and I were like kids in a candy store so we were just so happy to be with Oldman and ask him questions."

One of the film's standout performances comes from Tom Hardy as Forrest, who croaks out monosyllabic grunts after long pauses in the middle of dialogue exchanges.  According to Cave, Hardy's choices were unexpected but hugely effective.  "Personally I his performance is incredibly memorable," he said. "But, it’s very much what he brought to it. His frame of reference was equally as bizarre. When we were in rehearsal in Georgia, he said, 'I want to play Forrest like an old lesbian.' I went, 'Okay.' At another point, he said, 'I’ve changed my mind. Now, I want to play it like the little old lady in Tweetie Pie.' I went, 'Okay.' But when he did it, it made sense. What he is, is this woman, matriarch, like the mother, trying to hold this fatherless family together. He’s literary sitting around dying socks, but a violent person at the same time and he doesn’t say much. When Jessica Chastain’s character comes in, it’s not so much of a love thing, it’s that she’s a direct threat to his matriarchal world that he’s built. That was interesting. That was a whole thing that Tom brought to the character. The grunting and that stuff was something that initially mystified everyone. Like, 'What the fuck is he doing?' But, I think he was playing the long game and he understood this character and he understood that when it was cut together, it would be fucking incredible. That is what a great actor to do. You want someone who is going to come in and blow everyone away. That is what Tom Hardy did."

Lawless arrives in theaters tomorrow, August 29th.